Bezos to Raise $100B for AI and Nvidia's Challenges

0:00Welcome to the podcast. I'm your host, Jayne Schaefer. Today on the show, there is a hilarious question that TechCrunch is asking, which is, are AI tokens the new signing bonus or just a cost of doing business? As companies are giving token allocations to engineers, there's a lot of funny stuff that's going on with that. We're also going to be talking about why Wall Street wasn't really won over by Nvidia's big conference that they recently did. There is an exclusive tour of Amazon's Trainiam Lab. This is the chip that won over anthropic open AI and even Apple. Talk about what's going on inside of that. And WordPress.com is now letting AI agents write and publish posts and more, which honestly, I actually use WordPress to this day. Jeff Bezos is also reportedly looking for $100 billion to buy and transform old manufacturing firms with AI. We're getting into all of that on the podcast today. But before we do, I wanted to mention that AI Box has just launched video on our platform for both of our playground and our builder. So if you want to build really cool tools that have automations that include video, whether that's Open AI Sora, Google V03,

1:01or a ton of other cool video generation models, go check out the AI Box.ai platform. My very own startup. It's only $8.99 a month to get started. You can generate video, image, audio, text, and tons of other cool stuff, including music and sound effects. So go check out AI Box.ai for $8.99. You had access to basically all of the top AI models that you'd usually have to spend $20 each for. So hopefully that's something that saves you a ton of money and also a ton of time juggling between different tabs. You can get it all in one central place on AI Box.ai. All right, let's get into the episode today. The first story I wanted to talk about is AI token compensation. So right now, token is becoming a really tokens to generate AI things like clawed tokens or becoming a really big budget layer to what a lot of developers and companies are paying their users for. It's almost like swag, right? When you go join a company and they're like, oh, check out, you get this free cool backback and this free cool hoodie and all this stuff. This is what you're getting now with cloud spend

2:02and token allocation. Engineers that are in what are called quote unquote like high impact areas are getting larger token allocations. And that means they get better tools, they get faster outputs, they get basically potentially a better career path. People that are in a role that they're like, well, it's not quite as important. They're going to cut back on that and you basically are getting held back from the fastest career growth path. So it's kind of an interesting conundrum for a lot of these companies. The second story I wanted to cover is that Nvidia's GTC conference really didn't impress Wall Street. This is kind of interesting. The Nvidia stock actually dropped during the keynote. I think that's a pretty strong signal. Even, you know, they had a lot of positive announcements. And even that wasn't enough to really meet expectations, which just goes to show how I don't wanna say hyped up, but like, Nvidia has had such a meteoric rise. It's grown so much. I think people expect so much from it. And Nvidia right now is a $4 trillion company, but it is under a lot of pressure

3:02because at that scale, growth expectations are really extreme. I think it's not enough to just lead AI they have to really dominate it continuously. I mean, if you've heard a lot of the interviews coming out of Jensen Huang at the conference, they have huge plans, huge vision, huge ideas. He wants to dominate a lot of industries and people just don't think it's enough or they don't think he can pull it off. I think right now investors are worried because there's a lot of other hyperscalers that are building tools, right? We have Amazon, we have Google, we have a lot of others that are building their own chips. I think that's basically the biggest long-term threat to Nvidia's dominance. I think AI demand right now might be, you know, potentially peaking. I think there's concern that current spending is front-loaded. A lot of companies may slow investment when some of their initial infrastructure is built. And so I think the narrative is shifting a bit from kind of growth to sustainability. And Wall Street is asking, you know, can Nvidia maintain the margins when competition is really entering the market? So that's going to be what we have to look out for there. The next thing I want to cover is Amazon's Tranium Lab.

4:02This is a huge story for a number of different reasons, but Tranium is already being used by a lot of the top AI labs. Anthropic, open AI, even Apple are all reportedly using it. Amazon is vertically integrating the AI stack, which means that they are not just hosting the models. They're actually building the chips, they're running the infrastructure and they're distributing the models. Tranium right now is optimized for cost efficiency, not for peak power. And so Nvidia is really winning on the performance and Amazon is competing on price per token. AWS right now is turning into kind of this multi-modal marketplace. You have Tranium, you have Betterock, you have multiple model providers and Amazon is becoming basically the default AI distribution layer. I think this is the real, you know, Nvidia threat. It's not really a startup. The biggest competitor is not just another chip startup for Nvidia. It's that these hyperscalers control a lot of demand and people are, you know, let's say they're buying access to Nvidia through AWS. Well, if Amazon starts to create some of their own chips and some of their other, you know, tools that threaten Nvidia,

5:02it's really easy for them to market that and promote that to their users and steal a lot of market share straight from Nvidia. The next thing I want to cover is WordPress's AI publishing. So I think WordPress right now is trying to unlock fully autonomous content loops. Basically, we know with tools like OpenClaw agents can now research, right, publish with no human required blogs. And there's been a lot of like AI tools that have helped to do this type of stuff in the past. I've even messed around with it a lot. And if you, I mean, basically it's, you're going to have the same problem is, you've always had on the internet, which is if you create low quality things, if people don't really appreciate use, if they don't have a lot of, you know, if they don't stay on your web page for a long time, reading your content, if they bounce quickly because it looks low quality or AI generated, then you're just going to fall in the Google ranking. So I think it's important to note that like as a caveat to this whole story, you know, WordPress sure is, is kind of getting in more with AI, but if you make low quality content, it's not really going to benefit you. And for people that are too concerned about AI Slop, if people don't like the website, if you see AI Slop,

6:05it gets very, you know, Google does a good job of demoting that in the search results. Okay, so here's what's happening. WordPress right now they power 40% of the web. I think basically all the websites I personally use are running off of WordPress. I don't use a lot of other, I mean, other than just custom coded stuff, I feel downloadable. That's kind of one of the primary places. And so it's not like a niche, it's basically the biggest distribution for websites. But the biggest story here is that basically WordPress.com is embracing AI agents. And when I say WordPress.com, that doesn't mean every WordPress website because WordPress.com is a place that you can go and host and publish websites on, and WordPress.org is kind of the software that runs on websites for free. So I just want to differentiate the two of them there. But WordPress.com has decided that they as a website and organization are going to embrace AI agents. They put out a whole kind of post about this. But basically what that means is that there's going to be a side panel that you can talk to. And basically AI agents are going to be able to draft and publish all of your content on your website.

7:07They're going to be able to manage your comments. They're going to be able to update and fix metadata and organize content with tags and categories. A lot of the stuff that was quite menial to do in the task or in the past is now going to be able to be accomplished by these AI agents on your website. Honestly, I'm a huge fan. I think this is amazing. What I'll say is that the hosted version of WordPress.com, it's only a really small fraction of the 43% of websites that WordPress powers. Still, it is a pretty big footprint. There's about 20 billion page users, about 409 million unique visitors every month that go through websites that are hosted via WordPress.com. So those websites will get access to this. But it's not every website in the world and it's not the full kind of WordPress's 40% of the entire website that's kind of getting access to all of these tools. All right, the last story of the day is that Jeff Bezos is looking to spend $100 billion on AI manufacturing roll ups. Essentially, he would be starting a brand new fund, which is going to be used to buy companies

8:08in basically a lot of the major industrial sectors. I think ultimately he's trying to modernize and automate them with AI. This is according to a bunch of stuff that was published on the Wall Street Journal. And this is all kind of in relation to Jeff Bezos' AI startup, which is called Project Prometheus. It was originally reported that Jeff Bezos was working with them in November. He's kind of the co-founder and a co-CEO. He's alongside the former Google Executive Vic Buttjadge. And Prometheus had about $6.2 billion in funding. They were focusing on creating these kind of high-level AI models. And specifically, they were just trying to improve things that were happening inside of manufacturing and engineering, also inside of aerospace, automotive, a bunch of other sectors like that. I think the new manufacturing fund that he's raising right now is going to support that mission. And they're going to start buying up companies that are going to ultimately use some of the models coming out of Prometheus. It's kind of an interesting strategy. If you think about it, according to the Wall Street Journal, Bezos was recently traveling to Singapore in the Middle East

9:09as he was trying to raise funds for this effort. And I think right now, his plan is to acquire companies in areas like aerospace, chipmaking, and defense. And it's an interesting strategy, right? He's literally acquiring companies that would be customers. And so instead of having to go find customers to use his product, he goes acquires the company and then puts his AI inside of those. It's kind of a fascinating strategy. And I guess he wants to raise $100 billion to go and do this, which is interesting because Project Prometheus initially launched with $6.2 billion in funding. So the software company has only raised $6.2 billion in funding, but he's trying to raise a new fund of $100 billion just for the acquisition of the companies that will be powered by this. So really fascinating story. Guys, thank you so much for tuning into the podcast. If this was interesting and if you learned anything new about the AI industry today, it mean the world to me. If you left a rating or a review on the podcast, and as always, make sure to go check out aibox.ai. If you want to try our latest video models

10:11that we've added to the platform as well as dozens of other models, we just went from having about 40 models to over 70 of the top AI models all in one place for $8.99 a month and you get 20% off if you get an annual plan. All right, guys, thanks for tuning in and I will catch you in the next episode.